Customers expect the same responsiveness and transparency from the people who deliver their electricity as from those who deliver their groceries, books, and more. This demand intensifies during outages, when customers require up-to-the-minute assurances on outage location, who is affected, estimated time of restoration and more.

In many cases, the control room supplies this information to customer service representatives (CSRs).  For control room staff working diligently to fix the problem, this desire to be transparent can conflict with their ability to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. The less stress put onto the control room to provide updates, the faster they can end the outage. Utilities must therefore provide CSRs with an alternative method of  gaining the information they need.

SurvalentONE Call Handler is a dedicated outage management tool for CSRs that provides access to current outage information, including estimated time of restoration, to enable quick call resolution. CSRs can easily search for the customer’s account using a variety of methods and then record information provided by the call. If authorized, CSRs can ping customer meters directly to ensure that the utility can see their specific outage. Call Handler automatically associates the call record to any active outage case the caller is experiencing. CSRS can also create tickets for calls unrelated to outages.

Utilities can choose from the SmartVU Call Handler interface or the web-based SurvalentONE Call Handler Portal. These flexible viewing options allow CSRs to find the customer and outage information they need without having to learn a complex application or requiring access to the utility’s secure ADMS environment.